Dr Darren Ellis

Research on Emotion, Surveillance and Digital Life
My research has broadly focused on three related areas: emotional disclosure processes, digital life and emotion, surveillance studies and affect.  
Emotional Disclosure Processes
After obtaining first-class honours, I won a PhD scholarship for Loughborough University, where I used a mixed-methods approach (measuring psychophysiology and discourse analysis) to investigate emotional disclosure processes. Research in this area led to the writing of the emotions module and my first book for Sage Publications: Social Psychology of Emotion.  
Surveillance Studies and Emotion
Professors David Harper, Ian Tucker and I obtained some funding to develop a project on Everyday Experiences of Surveillance, which resulted in multiple outputs. For example, I led two research articles from this project, one on trust (Ellis et al., 2013b), which was nominated for the 2014 SAGE Prize for Innovation and/or Excellence; the other was on affective atmospheres (Ellis et al., 2013a). This project led to a significant amount of public engagement; for example, it featured on the front cover of the Psychologist (Ellis et al., 2016). More recently,y I wrote an article for Science as Culture on surveillance apatheia (Ellis, 2019).
Emotion and Digital Life
I was invited by Routledge Studies in Science, Technology and Society to write a book on Emotion in the Digital Age (Ellis and Tucker, 2020). This stemmed from research that I had conducted in surveillance and emotion, but more recently on Social Media and Affect. For example, Tony Sampson and I have organised multidisciplinary annual conferences at UEL on Social Media and Affect. We selected material from these for an edited book (Sampson, Maddison, and Ellis, 2018).